Moderators
Delegates
Recent Caucuses
Search
Charter transfers
Catalyst Chicago and WBEZ-Chicago collaborated on a report about the surprising number of students transferring from charters and the link to tough discipline at these schools. Should regular public schools have the same freedom to write a stronger discipline code for students if parents and the school want one?
Regular public schools have always had fair discipline codes--but they seldom used them. I worked at a regular public school that did not provide In-School Suspension, nor did they suspend students. Suspensions negatively impacted the attendance rate. The students ran wild. It was difficult to teach, and those students who wanted to learn learned less. The teachers were used as disciplinarians, not as teachers. Something went wrong in the classrooms every day. Habitually students came to school angry, disrespectful, or out of control. No discipline or counseling was available to address many of those issues. As students are "written up" on discipline notices the notices are often disregarded because of technicalities (new or changed procedures) or based on the disciplinarian's opinion that it "may be" classroom management. Sometimes it was a matter of strained relationships between the disciplinarian and the parent. If the public schools were consistent in enforcing the existing discipline code, then all schools would be viable schools, and public and charter schools would not be forced into swapping students.
Students are children and each one is different. Any kind of uniform discipline code pigeonholes each child and does not deal with underlying issues. Schools should have the freedom to come up with a variety of ways of dealing with discipline, but there needs to be two major considerations: the well-being of all the other students in the school and the needs of the child being disciplined.
CPS can offer a variety of discipline programs and require that whatever each school adopts should meet these two criteria. Zero-tolerance does not work for anyone! It demonized some children who are desperately in need of support/counseling/family intervention, etc. It removes any room for judgment on the part of the people who know the students and their families.
Discipline issues are tightly connected to how schools work with families and what kind of support and services are offered. If social services are cut, if there are no school-family-community programs in operation, then of course, zero-tolerance is the cheapest recourse. It is also the least effective.
This story raises many red flags about the role of charters in our public school system. Consider that only 20% of charters perform as well or better than their neighborhood school counterparts and the "good" charters like Nobel Street use draconian measures to push out undesirable students. What is the impact of charter expansion when it results in nearly 5 times the rate of expulsion and double the rate of transfer out as traditional schools? The implications are devastating. We already know that school stability is a critical variable in the success and development of young minds.
Ultimately our schools need to be vibrant and differentiated environments that can take on the trauma, dislocation, poverty and pain that our children bring with them into the classroom. They cannot do that when some schools are privileged with the ability to avoid the hard but important work of educating children with behavior disorders, special needs, limited language proficiency, etc. Instead of creating a parallel system of schools that has largely failed at doing this hard work, let's reinvest in our traditional schools and the existing charter network to create a plethora of services, strong pedagogical praxis between content areas and the community, teacher voice in school policy and major school level decisions, invested and well trained LSCs, lower class sizes, and beyond.
I have often wondered why individual schools cannot write stronger discipline codes if desired by parents and school staff. I guess I always assumed it had to do with some Chicago-specific law with which I am unfamiliar. I do know that other school districts allow schools to determine their own discipline policies.
I came to Chicago from New Orleans where I taught in the public schools (several years pre-Katrina), and specifically in a school called a “fundamental high school”. Fundamental high schools were magnet schools open to all students who were willing to sign a disciplinary contract that was quite a bit stricter than the disciplinary codes of neighborhood schools. While New Orleans had selective enrollment magnet schools, just like the ones in Chicago, fundamental high schools required no academic testing or any other kind of prerequisite, other than a willingness to sign and adhere to the disciplinary contract. Naturally, there was a long waiting list of parents wanting to enroll their children, but what made these schools really different was that students could enroll themselves as long as they had their parents sign a permission form. Talk about some highly motivated students!
It is interesting that the charter schools in the Catalyst-WBEZ collaboration seem so much like those schools – with the exception that no games had to be played about their purpose and function.
Most interesting to me was INCS's response (http://www.incschools.org/documents/CatalystWBEZTransferResponse.PDF) to the Catalyst story. First they attack the story as being inaccurate, denying the unusually high attrition rate among many of Chicago's charter schools or even admitting there's a problem. Then they turn around and defend high student attrition rates by claiming that students leave charters or are counseled out because they fail to meet charters' "higher standards." They also omit any mention of the widespread exclusion of kids with disabilities, severe behavioral problems, or of English-language learners. Their reported increases in charter test scores are made using inflated numbers resulting from counseling out low-testing students.
All this adds up to the reproduction of the old two-tier system of public education in Chicago. This is a great departure from the ideals and values that marked the early charter and small schools movements.
Ironically, even with their claim of higher standards and millions spent on professional lobbying groups and PR firms, you still won't find charter schools listed in the ranks of the city's top-performing schools and about 2/3 of them are performing at or below the level of the neighborhood schools they were brought in to replace. This despite hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funding coming from corporations, powerhouse foundations, and billionaire celebrities allowing some of them to have longer school days without having to compensate teachers for the extra hours.
Net result--it's not just students being pushed out in higher numbers, but teachers as well.